Taiwan apologizes for naming dish 'Long Live the Nazis'

A menu change at a restaurant in Taiwan dumps their popular 'Long Live Nazis' dish from list, prompted by a local TV station feature.

Taiwan is home to a wide array of offbeat restaurants that reel in young people and tourists in search of wacky and weird food. Apparently, the gimmick must work because Taiwan has become world renown for bizarre eating establishments that function as modern day roadside attractions.

At the cute end of the novelty spectrum, we have the Kitten Garden in the Shilin District where cats are allowed to free range the premises. Cat hair in the dim sum could be a concern, but it can't get much worse than that if they've been recently fumigated for fleas. If you're partial to auto graveyards, you might like to try P.S. Bu Bu, also located in the Shilin District. There you'll dine amongst rusted out car parts that provide a post-industrial inducement to the digestive juices. Then at the more revolting end of Taiwanese food haunts in Shilin, you will encounter a restaurant that serves everything in little toilets. Called the Modern Toilet, they live up to their name by providing functioning toilets (and food) for guests.

But the restaurant that received the most negative press of late is located in New Taipei and doesn't serve food in toilets or in faux junk yards. Rockmill Restaurant serves Italian food in the Banqiao District of New Taipei City in northern Taiwan and eschews most of the extreme weirdness of their competitors. Low key in comparison to the others, they managed to get put on the bizarre and tasteless restaurant register by placing an ordinary German sausage on their menu called 'Long Live the Nazis.'

According to Chao Ya-hsin, the 24-year-old manager of the Rockmill restaurant, they were looking for a catchy name for the pasta and sausage dish, wanting to make a German connection because of the main ingredients. But after a good run that lasted about a year, a local TV station recently featured the restaurant’s dish, giving the beleaguered sausage a bad rap that went viral. Renamed 'Long Live Purity,' the sausage kept its legendary longness but traded its ruthless moniker with nicer one. According to Ms. Chao, no one had a problem with the inappropriately named sausage until the TV segment ran.

“It never occurred to us that the word Nazi would stir up such controversy,” who later offered a sincere apology over the restaurant’s lack of sensitivity. Ms. Chao added that in the year the restaurant had been selling the dish, they had not received any complaints. “In fact, it is considered one of our most popular dishes. We hope from now on, customers who eat this dish will enjoy it in sheer joy,” said Ms. Chao.

News of the sausage and pasta dish reverberated around the world, stirring up criticism from Israeli and German officials, who told the European Press Photo agency that the naming of the dish demonstrated a “lack of understanding about history and the Nazis’ slaughter of Jews.”

The Brookmill Restaurant incident isn't the first of its kind in this region. In 2000, a restaurant based out of Taipei hung photographs of Nazi concentration camps on its walls. These images were later taken down. And in 2011, the National Defense Ministry posted a photo of three students in Nazi uniforms at a ministry summer camp. The defense minister later apologized for this incident.